Less maintenance. Less work to package during your automated builds. Too easy. Remember Our Old Friend _PublishedWebsites? You’ve probably seen the _PublishedWebsites folder when building websites in automated builds. If not you can stop paying attention now. Still with me? Great! So you know how it...

Recently we had a contest to see who could beat my time to get from no code to deployed. Thanks to everyone that participated and everyone that thought about participating in the contest. Most Creative From Zero To Deployed Contest Extended! Unfortunately there were not enough entries to award the most...

Easy and Instant deployments and instant scale for .NET? Awhile back a few of us were looking at Ruby Gems as the answer to package management for .NET . The gems platform supported the concept of DLLs as packages although some changes would have needed to happen to have long term use for the entire...

For those that have not yet heard, NuGet went v1 recently along with a whole slew of tools from the Microsoft folks. I’ve been lucky to be a part of the NuGet project and see it take shape over the past few months with community input and contributions. Even though v1.0 was released, we are already moving...

Recently UppercuT (UC) quietly released version 1 (in August). I’m pretty happy with where we are, although I think it’s a few months later than I originally planned. I’m glad I held it back, it gave me some more time to think about some things a little more and also the opportunity to receive a patch...

Dru and I were recently featured on Herding Code Podcast. In the podcast we talk about everything from package management in general to Nubular (Nu) to other package management systems ( OpenWrap , Bricks , and Horn , although horn was/is slightly different) to the possibility of Microsoft releasing...

Imagine we are awhile into the future. How do you get open source releases down to your project so that you can use them? How do you get the products down to your computer so that you can use them? Is it easier or harder than the way we’ve always done it before? The Past and Present Before we can go...

In a previous post I mentioned how I was going to show you how UppercuT (UC) has the ability to make gems stupid simple to create and publish. You ask if gems can get any easier and to that I answer, “Why YES, they can!” How about just filling out the information for the gemspec, running...

In my last post I didn’t mention dependencies. Dependencies are their own animal. They require a couple more things to be in place. Let’s talk about those things. In the .NET world, the dependency for compiled bits is usually an exact version of a reference. Let me explain. So for example...

In my last post I showed gems being used for .NET. Now let’s talk about How. Most of this stuff I’ve learned over the past two days, so if I have a mistake here or you have a better idea, please don’t hesitate to offer a better solution. The GemSpec The Gem::Specification reference...

The Ruby community has enjoyed a great user experience with a package management system they use called Gems. A gem is a package (or a library), compressed with some additional metadata, and can be either source files or binaries. Let’s focus on binary gems. We have the same concept in .NET (DLLs...

“Open source feature selection is subjective.” An interesting question was posed to me recently at a presentation - “How do you decide what features to include in the [open source] projects you manage?” Is It Objective? I’d like to say that it’s really objective and that we vote on features and look...

Right now I’m on the train on my way back from Chicago. It’s interesting to be drinking a Corona and hanging out in the lounge while I’m watching the miles go by. Chicago was a nice time. I had never been so we decided to vacation in Chicago and see the sites – posts coming at the other blog . My presentation...

I mentioned this awhile back on twitter, but UppercuT (UC) has support for Mercurial for versioning your assemblies. In the settings file, all you need to do it tell UC to use hg. When you build your assemblies, they will use the changeset number in the version, and in the informational version, you...

Chuck Norris doesn’t program with a keyboard. He stares the computer down until it does what he wants. All things need a name. We’ve tossed around a bunch of names for the framework of tools we’ve been working on, but one we kept coming back to was Chuck Norris. Why did we choose Chuck Norris...